Governments bombarded Twitter with over 1,000 data requests in only six months

In the wake of the NSA scandal, Twitter revealed that they released an additional 15 percent worth of data to government agencies.

During the first half of 2013, American and foreign government law-enforcement agencies made 1,157 requests for information about users of the short message service.

Despite these staggering numbers, these figures do not include classified national security-related data requests. Thirty-six countries were represented on the list.

The statistics come from a transparency report released by Twitter. Seventy-eight percent of requests come from the United States, whereas Japan earns the second largest number of requests, which is about 8 percent of overall requests.

Twitter said that they always “notify affected users of requests for their account information unless we’re prohibited by law.”

In a recent blog post, Twitter’s legal policy manager Jeremy Kessel claimed that an important conversation has begun regarding “the extent which companies should be allowed to publish information regarding national security requests.”

“We believe it’s important to be able to publish numbers of national security requests — including FISA disclosures — separately from non-secret requests,” Kessel said. “Unfortunately, we are not able to include such metrics.”

Twitter stated that they receive fewer demands than Facebook, Microsoft, or Google, but this may be due to the public nature of Twitter.